Like most 40 year-olds, CICS is wiser and smarter than it was in its younger years, but doesn’t look quite as good from the outside as it did as a teenager. System administration or development typically involves interacting with green-screen programs being run inside a 3270 emulation program launched from a PC desktop. However, surrounding the emulated green screen are likely to be any number of other applications such as email clients, a Web browser, and other graphical applications. Users will interact with these using the mouse, metaphors such as drag and drop, copy and paste, and expect features such as integrated help, wizards, support for undo, and other items that make them productive.
In addition to old-style CICS development with C*** transactions or batch compiles, there are many modern desktop programs that also interact with CICS, including monitoring tools that show graphs of CPU and storage over time, or Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) that allow authoring of COBOL programs for CICS deployment.
This mixed landscape has led to two significant concerns:
• Relevance. The green-screen image of CICS leads some to incorrectly assume that it is no longer relevant for new applications, or to shy away from it because its usability is mismatched with the fit and finish of other runtime tools. While the current generation of systems programmers might be comfortable with ISPF and Time Sharing Option (TSO), they’re likely to have grey, if any, hair, and a collection of vinyl records in their loft. It’s important that CICS also be attractive and intuitive to the next generation of System z champions in their organizations so the skills don’t disappear as the baby boomers approach retirement age.
• Interoperability. Many CICS add-on tools involve doing either real-time or historic analysis of data to identify issues such as poorly performing transactions, programs with affinities, or candidate resources for group or repository cleanup. Some of these are written in ISPF, while others have their own proprietary interfaces which might be rich desktop clients or browser applications. In each case, when the tool must present CICS data, it has had to invent its own interface and underlying technology to access CICS. This means users must learn and maintain a plethora of different ways to visualize and manipulate CICS, shifting back and forth between the various tools to complete a particular scenario, losing consistency and productivity each time a context switch occurs.
CICS Explorer
IBM, in collaboration with customers and business partners, launched the CICS Explorer project to tackle both issues. To succeed, the CICS Explorer must be pervasive, provide a compelling solution to customers, and be extensible so tools tailored to particular scenarios can extend and embrace it as a desktop information hub for CICS, the transaction server, tools, and the other environments with which it interacts.
Available at no cost from www.ibm.com/cics/explorer for either a Windows or Linux client, the CICS Explorer requires CICS Transaction Server (TS) Version 3.1 or more recent versions.
CICS Explorer is intended to offer a modern, intuitive systems management experience. Figure 1 shows a typical systems management perspective in the CICS Explorer: two CICSPlexes together with their active regions and resource groups, and scoped views of defined and installed files. All operational resources—such as files, programs, or tasks—can be viewed either for a specific region or across an entire CICSPlex. If a specific view isn’t present, it can be opened from the operations or administration pull-down menu and positioned freely in the workbench, allowing creation of customized perspectives. The user can configure which attributes he wants columns for, in which order, how large the columns should be, and any filter criteria. The filtering is powerful and extensive. As shown in Figure 1, users can drill down to see all files that are open, start with the letter F, and use Local Shared Resource (LSR) pool 1, where the filter values have been entered in the top toolbar of the files view.
When connecting to a CICS TS 3.1 or 3.2 system, the CICS Explorer functionality is read-only; it lets you search installed resources and their definitions, but you can’t modify them or perform actions such as discard or install. With TS 3.1 and 3.2, you can connect the CICS Explorer by using the CICSPlex SM Web user interface server IP address and port number.
CICS TS 4.1 includes a new Web 2.0 interface into CICS—the CICS Management Client Interface (CMCI). The CICS Explorer exploits this and can query resources and their definitions, make updates, create definitions, and perform actions such as install or discard. It offers complete lifecycle coverage for operations, making it a graphical equal to the function offered by the traditional CEDA- and CEMT-style CICS transactions.
Figure 2 shows a sample flow from creating a TDQueue definition, modifying it, installing it into an active region, and then discarding the installed resource. Familiar desktop metaphors are used for these tasks; the create is done with a wizard that prompts for the minimum essential information required to define the TDQueue. The editor uses rich GUI controls grouped in tabs to help organize information and provide contextual assistance, the install involves simply selecting from a list of active candidate regions, and discard occurs with a pop-up menu against the live file.
Users who are comfortable with other desktop applications find CICS, presented through the CICS Explorer, a natural and welcoming experience as:
• The editor supports undo.
• Entry fields are checked against lists of allowable values and ranges to avoid mistakes.
• Fully integrated contextual help is available to describe the purpose and effect of each modification.
Authentication to CICS occurs by the user entering his System z user ID and password which, together with secure sockets, ensures there’s no access for unauthorized users.
The user interface provided for regions, whether or not part of a CICSPlex, and for definitions, whether or not in a CSD or a CICSPlex SM data repository, is the same and offers a consistent set of views, wizards, and editors. This helps provide a single, consistent way of accessing CICS, regardless of how it’s configured or where the definitions reside, helping reinforce CICS Explorer as the new way of operating CICS.
The CICS Explorer is built using the Eclipse framework, which provides an extensible platform for hosting and building tools that has achieved huge success in the application development space. Not only is the Eclipse framework a hugely successful Integrated Development Platform, but it’s also a successful platform for building rich desktop software used by organizations ranging from national railway companies to rocket scientists. One of the reasons for Eclipse’s adoption by people building desktop applications is its ability to allow components to be installed, side by side, in the same environment to create a customized tool specific for a particular scenario or role. CICS Explorer was designed to offer tools that enhance and extend system administration and let users benefit from having additional functionality included in the existing, familiar environment.
IBM’s Configuration Manager provides governance and control over CICS definitions via journaling of changes and the ability to search and simultaneously manage definitions across multiple CSDs or CICSPlex data repositories. Before the CICS Explorer project, IBM’s Configuration Manager provided an ISPF interface to its users, letting them create, edit, install, and delete definitions. While powerful, this wasn’t the same as the analogous non-CM task done through Cross-Environment Data Access (CEDA) or the CPSM Web user interface.
A test of CICS Explorer’s extensibility is whether a plug-in for Configuration Manager could be built that would provide value-add specific to the tool, yet have the same interaction experience with CICS definitions that are used to interact with TS V3 or V4. This is already the case with the CICS Explorer, which provides a single set of views for definitions that come from either the CSD or CICSPlex SM data repository. The CICS Explorer was extended by Configuration Manager to have the same experience for definitions provided as the base CICS Explorer, except that views have been added to show change history across the repository, allowing deep backup and recovery as well as governance. The powerful cross-repository search functions of Configuration Manager are available directly from the base function through pop-up menus and context-driven selection.
The object-oriented nature of the CICS Explorer means that actions which can be performed against a CICS definition, such as install, open, and discard, operate against the Configuration Manager representation in the search view, the history view, or wherever the CICS resource is represented. The interface for definitions used by the CICS Explorer can access definitions directly in a CSD or in the CICSPlex SM Data Repository as well as with the Configuration Manager back-end without changing the user experience. This validates one of the initial design goals of the CICS Explorer, namely its ability to offer a single, consistent view of CICS irrespective of what back-end technology is being used. Furthermore, Rational Developer for System z builds on this by embedding the CICS Explorer inside its integrated development environment and using it to provide operational access to CICS regions and their installed resources. This provides users with only one application to learn and operate, thus reducing the development effort shared across the entire vendor community and building value-add tools for CICS. This extensibility around a single view of CICS is extended further by IBM’s CICS tools Performance Analyzer (PA) and Interdependency Analyzer (IA), which provide analysis from SMF data or collections from capturing CICS program resource interactions for off-line analysis. By being hosted in the same Eclipse environment as the CICS Explorer function, which allows access to definitions irrespective of which repository they are held as well as installed resources in active regions, when candidate resources have been identified for change, the user can navigate straight into the definition or resource and make the change without needing to start or log onto a different administrative console.
Figure 3 shows the pop-up menu for a CICS resource, which for the base CICS Explorer had the system management options for open, discard, and others, is now extended by the tools to allow drilling into PA and IA to show dependency usage and historic response times captured for a task.
Figure 4 shows the front-end plugins for CM, IA and PA; there are additional tools that extend, or have the potential to extend, the CICS Explorer, such as:
• CICS Transaction Gateway, which has a plug-in that allows viewing of gateways
• Rational Developer for z, which uses an integrated CICS Explorer to allow developers to perform system administration tasks on their development regions
• The CICS and MQ Explorer, which can be installed side by side to provide a single management console for multiple System z run-time.
The Eclipse framework provides a documented set of extensions so developers can contribute views, pop-up menus, toolbars, perspectives, and many other contribution points whereby tools can be woven together to give the user a rich, integrated solution. This gives rise to one of the design goals of the CICS Explorer: that “the whole exceeds the sum of the parts,” where each piece operates together in a way that builds on the function already installed and provides value-add for specific scenarios without reinventing or redefining overlapping areas of function.
CICS Explorer also has its own System Developer Kit (SDK) that lets IBM’s business partners or Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) create plug-ins and provide a route for IT shops to integrate in-house applications with the CICS Explorer. This helps create a set of tools that have value on their own but can interoperate around the CICS Explorer, giving the end-user more power (see Figure 4). What’s neat is that the Application Programming Interface (API) to do this is the same one IBM uses for its tools, and there are no “special tricks” that IBM uses for its tools built on top of the CICS Explorer that can’t be employed by others wishing to add to the environment. This is beneficial because it:
• Helps validate the API as complete
• Creates a level playing field to nurture and grow a community of independent companies and users
• Fosters a healthy, competitive ecosystem that allows the CICS Explorer to continue to grow.
You can join a CICS Facebook group and get updates on CICS at:
• www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/group.php?gid=4907254593
• http://twitter.com/cicsfluff
• http://twitter.com/ibm_cics.
To view videos that demonstrate how to create your own CICS Explorer plug-in, debug a CICS Web service in CICS Explorer, define and install a CICS application in the CICS Explorer, and take a CICS event out to WebSphere Business Monitor, go to:
• www.youtube.com/user/CICSfluff
• www.youtube.com/user/CICSExplorer
• www.youtube.com/watch? v=e-Xz-OAeD28
• www.youtube.com/ watch?v=m2EvyQ7mx18
• www.youtube.com/watch? v=-wQhxFfmd9U.
As you learn more about CICS Explorer, you’ll see that it’s on its way to being adopted as the pervasive, complete, and functionally rich new face of CICS.
